Common strategies for improving and protecting the lives of farmed animals.
This report describes and analyses 16 strategies employed by the Farmed Animal Protection Movement (FAPM). It is a portion of a larger Landscape Report on the FAPM that Farm Forward was commissioned to produce for a client in the funding community.
The aim of the larger Landscape Report was both descriptive (to provide helpful information for a funder seeking to learn about the FAPM to inform their grantmaking) and prescriptive (to help guide our client toward funding decisions that align with the values they articulated and with Farm Forward’s own assessments of the funder’s potential impact). This revised version is condensed and edited with the aim of being useful to a larger audience.
In particular, we assume that readers already share certain values of the FAPM—a concern for the suffering of farmed animals, for example—and that readers are interested to learn more about the history, politics, structures, and ideologies that shape farmed animal protection.
We hope this report will facilitate greater investment and participation in farmed animal protection work by helping readers identify entry points for engaging with the advocacy community.
To produce our Landscape Report we conducted more than 30 interviews with leaders, staff, and funders within the FAPM and related advocacy spaces, and reviewed scientific and expert research, publicly available financial information, and nonprofit websites extensively. We also drew upon the direct experience of our own team. At the end of this report we provide a list of people we interviewed for the report, but have redacted their names within the document to preserve confidentiality. We presented the Landscape Report to our client in January 2020 and have revised and adapted this portion for a wider audience.
The FAPM strategies included in this report include:
The Glossary of Terms at the end of this document defines “insider” terms, industry jargon, and technical terms that are used frequently in the FAPM. The definitions represent the ways these terms are understood within the FAPM.
Farm Forward is a mission-driven nonprofit advocacy organization that conducts advocacy campaigns against factory farming and provides consultation to advocacy groups, funders, and businesses on a range of farmed animal protection issues. We do not claim to be neutral parties in the content of this report— rather, one of the strengths we bring to this project is our team’s deep experience as insiders within the FAPM movement.
As a result we have left out granular analysis and data that would be expected in a report claiming academic objectivity. We have attempted to be transparent when we are expressing Farm Forward’s informed opinions as well as observations based on our own experience rather than outside research or interviews (usually through footnotes). This report is not meant to provide a comprehensive or encyclopedic overview of the FAPM. Such a report could be valuable, but would require more extensive research (possibly with academic partners) over a longer period of time.
We assume two core common values with our readers: that the welfare and well-being of farmed animals matters, and that advocacy work which centers farmed animals merits more robust funding and support.